Users calling a remote service, such as a bank, retail service, stock broker, telecommunications service, medical centre, government service or the like are often required to identify or authenticate themselves to the remote service before being granted access to information or being allowed to conduct a transaction at the remote service.
For example, a customer of a bank wishing to transfer money via a phone call may be required to correctly provide information such as name, account number, date of birth, mother's maiden name and/or previous statement number, before the transfer is authorised. Sometimes a password or personal identification number (PIN) may also be required to confirm that the customer is actually the person they purport to be.
Even after this information has been gathered from the customer, there may still be a level of uncertainty in the authorisation. The quality of the authentication process is only as good as the difficulty of an impersonator gathering the required personal information about the customer in order to correctly answer the authentication questions.
The gathering and verification of identification information from customers of a remote service can also be time consuming. For example, if a bank receives 100 calls a day and takes 30 seconds to obtain adequate identification information, this costs the bank over 200 hours a year in staffing, just to identify and authenticate their customers. Also, the customers may need to retrieve account details, previous statements and other details in order to identify themselves before conducting a transaction. This may be time consuming and inconvenient.
It would be desirable to provide a method for authenticating or authorising a calling party to a remote service which addresses one or more of the limitations of existing methods for authorising calls.
The above discussion of background art is included to explain the context of the present invention. It is not to be taken as an admission that any of the documents or other material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge at the priority date of any one of the claims of this specification.